Find out where you stand on the five broad traits that personality research is built on. Rate short statements about yourself and see your profile right away.
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Answer 20 short questions with your gut feeling. There are no right or wrong answers.
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Each trait is a spectrum, and both ends come with their own strengths.
Your social energy and how at home you feel in a crowd
Extraversion describes how talkative and outgoing you are around other people. People who score high get a boost from company, while people who score low recharge in quieter settings. Introversion and shyness are different things: an introvert usually just prefers smaller groups and a calmer pace.
Key strengths
How warm and cooperative you are with other people
Agreeableness describes how warm and cooperative you are toward others. People who score high tend to try to understand the other person, lend a hand and smooth over tension. People who score low are more critical and direct; they aren't easily persuaded and don't shy away from an argument when one is needed.
Key strengths
Your tendency to plan ahead, stay organized and keep your word
Conscientiousness describes how planned and organized you are about getting things done. People who score high set goals, keep track of details and care about keeping their promises. People who score low are more spontaneous and flexible; when plans change, they can switch to the new situation without missing a beat.
Key strengths
How well you stay calm under stress and pressure
Emotional stability describes how often and how strongly you feel difficult emotions like stress, worry and anger. People who score high react calmly to setbacks and bounce back quickly after a bad day. People who score low feel things more intensely, and that sensitivity can also help them spot problems early. In personality research the opposite end of this trait is called neuroticism, and it isn't a diagnosis or a sign of illness.
Key strengths
Your curiosity about new ideas and different experiences
Openness to experience describes how curious you are about new ideas, art, abstract thinking and unusual experiences. People who score high use their imagination a lot and enjoy trying out different points of view. People who score low prefer familiar approaches they know will work, and they think in concrete terms. This trait isn't a measure of intelligence; it's about curiosity and how wide your interests are.
Key strengths
The Big Five personality test measures personality on five broad traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience. You may also see it called the five-factor model, or OCEAN, after the first letters of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, which is the low end of emotional stability.
The model grew out of a plain observation about language. English has thousands of words for describing people: chatty, tidy, touchy, curious, helpful. When researchers gathered these words and checked which ones tended to be used for the same people, most of them fell into a handful of large clusters. Those clusters became the Big Five, a name closely tied to the psychologist Lewis Goldberg.
Unlike tests that announce "you are type X", this approach doesn't put anyone in a box. Each trait is a line running from one end to the other, and most people land somewhere near the middle. Your profile is where you sit on those five lines.
All 20 items come from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain collection of personality items that Lewis Goldberg started for research use. Anyone can use or translate them without asking permission or paying a fee. This page uses the Mini-IPIP, a 20-item short form that Donnellan and colleagues published in 2006, built from the pool's 50-item Big Five set.
Some well-known personality questionnaires are copyrighted, and using them costs money. IPIP items were free for everyone from the start, so you're answering the same statements used in academic research. In the pool they're written as short fragments like "Get chores done right away"; the only change on this page is the "I" at the start.
There are 20 short statements, four for each trait. A short form paints a rougher picture than a long questionnaire, but it's enough to see your general tendencies. For each statement you pick one of five options, from "Not like me at all" to "Very much like me".
Some items are reverse-keyed, which means they're worded in the opposite direction. Agreeing with "I am the life of the party" raises your extraversion score, while agreeing with "I don't talk a lot" lowers it. Items for different traits are mixed together too, so a habit of giving the same answer every time can't easily skew the result.
Answer based on how you actually behave most of the time. If you answer as the person you'd like to be, you'll get that person's profile. Rather than going by the last few days, ask yourself how someone who has known you for years would describe you, and save "Neutral" for statements where you really can't decide. Your first honest reaction usually beats a long pause.
Each trait score comes from your answers to its four items and shows where you sit between the two ends. The key point is that a high or low score isn't good or bad. On a school exam, higher is always better. Here, each end makes some situations easier and others harder.
Someone low in extraversion may feel drained after a busy night out and still be perfectly happy spending hours on focused work alone. A very agreeable person tends to be well liked on a team but can struggle to ask for what they need. Low conscientiousness can mean more trouble with deadlines, yet when a plan falls apart, that person is often the quickest to adjust.
Middle scores mean something too. You probably adjust to the situation, talkative in a work meeting and quiet over the weekend. Most people sit there, so several middle scores are normal.
Each trait is also a broad umbrella. Extraversion covers wanting company as well as feeling comfortable speaking up in a group, and a 20-item test doesn't measure those pieces separately. Traits in combination tell you more. High extraversion plus high conscientiousness often means the person organizing the group trip; high extraversion with low conscientiousness looks more like the friend who pitches a great idea and leaves the follow-up to others.
A personality test is about as accurate as your self-knowledge and honesty allow. This one relies on self-report, so every score comes from how you see yourself. It isn't a diagnostic tool and doesn't replace an assessment by a qualified professional.
Self-report has well-known limits. People tend to describe themselves a little more favorably than they really are, which psychologists call social desirability bias. On a bad day, your emotional stability score may come out lower than usual. And others sometimes see our behavior more clearly than we do: someone who thinks of themselves as laid-back may seem tense to everyone else.
To soften these effects, retake the test a few weeks apart and see how consistent your results stay, or show your profile to someone who knows you well and ask how familiar it sounds. Using the result for hiring decisions or to label other people isn't a good idea.
The most practical benefit is putting a name to things you already half know about yourself. Questions like "Why am I wiped out after a busy week?" or "Why do my plans keep falling through?" often find a clue in your profile, and knowing that helps you set more realistic expectations.
It shows up quickly in how you study and work. If your conscientiousness score is low, outside structure tends to work better than willpower, whether that's reminders on your phone or big tasks cut into small chunks. If you're high in openness, finding new ways to do repetitive tasks can keep you motivated. The career test looks at which kinds of work match your interests.
In relationships, seeing how two profiles differ can head off misunderstandings. A very agreeable person and a less agreeable one can experience the same argument very differently: one feels hurt while the other thinks they were just giving an opinion. Taking the test with a partner or friend and comparing results is an easy way to talk about that kind of friction calmly. For the side of you that notices and handles emotions, try the emotional intelligence test.
Retaking it in a year can be interesting too, especially after a new job or another big change. Tests on other topics are on the personality tests page.
The Big Five personality test measures personality on five broad traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience. It's also known as the five-factor model or the OCEAN test. Instead of sorting you into a type, it shows where you fall between two ends on each trait.
Big Five tests are among the most widely used tools in personality psychology, and people who take the same test again usually get similar results. Your score still depends on your own answers, so your mood that day or how you'd like to see yourself can shift it. This test isn't a diagnostic tool, but it's a good starting point for getting to know yourself better.
The main difference is how they measure personality. Myers-Briggs (MBTI) sorts people by four either-or preferences and gives you a four-letter type. The Big Five treats each trait as a scale and uses a score to show where you sit on it, so it also captures differences in degree between two people who would end up with the same four letters.
Your basic traits are fairly stable in adulthood, but they don't stay completely fixed. Slow changes happen over the years, especially as people take on new roles and responsibilities, and on average people become a little more organized, agreeable and calm as they get older. You can retake the test a few months apart and compare your results.
On this test, a high or low score isn't good or bad. Each end makes some situations easier and others harder; low extraversion, for example, can mean getting tired quickly in crowds but also being able to focus alone for long stretches. It's best to read your result as a map of your tendencies.
This test has 20 items, 4 for each trait. The statements are short, so it takes about 3 minutes. Go with the first answer that feels true and don't overthink it.
Answer based on how you usually act. If you answer as the person you'd like to be, the result won't tell you much about yourself. Think about what you're like in general, not just over the last few days, and save Neutral for statements where you're really torn, because picking the middle every time blurs your result.
Yes, the test is free. The questions come from the Mini-IPIP, a 20-item short form drawn from the 50-item Big Five set in the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain collection of items started by Lewis Goldberg. Anyone can use these items without asking permission or paying a fee.
